Mac Notification Center Widgets Tips and Tricks

The key to getting use out of macOS widgets is to customize them to fit your needs. You can create multiple clocks, stock price and other widgets if those are more useful to you then others. Use notes and third-party photo widgets to add things you want to see.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some tips for using Notification Center Widgets. 
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So Notification Center Widgets allow you to put these useful information widgets at your fingertips by simply bringing up Notification Center. The simplest way to show it is to click on the Time on the upper right hand corner of your Mac screen although at the end of this video I'm going to show you some tips on other ways to bring it up. Click there and you can see the Widgets right here. At the top would normally be Notifications and underneath that are all of these widgets. Now a lot of people may ignore these widgets and not take the time to learn how to use them or customize them. But if you spend a little time editing these you can make them really useful. 
So my first tip is that the best widget is probably the Weather Widget. You could see it right here. I'm going to edit widgets by clicking the button here at the bottom and drag the Weather Widget all the way up to the top. One of the reasons why I think the weather widget is the best one because it's useful and there's no weather app on your Mac. This is how you view weather. So while on your iPhone and iPad you've got a dedicated app for this the Notification Center is where you'll see this. Not only can you see an hourly forecast and a daily forecast here and current conditions but just clicking on it will bring up weather for your area. Like with most widgets you Control Click on this and you can edit it. So you can change its size, make it small like that. I find it much better at Large. You could also edit right here and change the location if you want. So I have it set to always be my hometown. But if I click here I can also change it to my location. So it will change if you're traveling with your Mac.
Now another default widget here is the Calendar widget which shows you events and  things you've got going for today. This maybe useful for a lot of people. But it's not where I go to see what I've got going on today. However there's another Calendar widget that you should not sleep on. Go to Edit Widgets and then look for Calendar just to see the Calendar widgets. You'll see the list here but there's another one called Month. Add that and that's a little monthly calendar. I know a lot of people like to have one of these available. So I would move this and maybe have it in place of this one if you don't need it. 
Now you'll also notice the Clocks Calendar here. This one is a double-wide one, a medium size one, and has four different times on it. I can Control Click on it, Edit the clock and change which four cities are shown here. But you could also go to Clock here. Instead of using this you could use a single clock like that. But here's the tip: you can have multiple ones of these. So I could put two of these side-by-side. Now I can select this one and set it to my hometown and then I could select this one and set it to some other city. So this could be two cities that are important to me and I could see them side-by-side. I could so the same thing using this or the larger one but a lot of people don't realize that if you just want two or three or you want them arranged vertically you could just have multiple widgets that are the same widget but with different settings. 
Here's another cool thing that you could do. In addition to cities there is one other location you can choose and that's UTC. UTC time is very useful right now because a lot of people do online meetings and sometimes those online meetings have start times that are set as UTC time rather than a specific timezone since there are people from all over the world attending. Notice too that the clock background will change  from light to dark to indicate that that time is at night right now.
Next let's look at Stocks. Stocks are like the clock. You can have a single item here and you can have multiple ones of these. So you don't just have to go with the watch list of a medium size or large one if you want to do multiple things. You can have different ones setup for different stocks. So I can leave this one as Dow Jones and I can click this one and change the symbol to something else like Apple, for instance. 
Also you can track more that just regular stocks. Just about anything that you can find in Yahoo Finance you can track in those widgets. For instance what if I wanted the price of a precious metal like gold. I can look that up here in Yahoo Finance, check to make sure it's actually what I want, and then take that symbol here and then use that symbol inside of this to get that value. How about Bitcoin for instance. You could see this symbol here is this and I can Control Click here to edit this widget and change the symbol to that and now I get that value in here. Basically if it's a symbol you can look up in Yahoo Finance then you can have a widget that displays that value as well.
Another interesting widget is under News. Instead of today to get some general information you can choose a topic and you can have this set to any site that you want. So, let's add this large topic widget here. You can see it's set to science. I can change the topic to something else if I want. I can search and there's a wide variety. Like this, like this. You can search for something local and even find specific sources. So there's a lot you can choose and then you can get news that pertains just to that one topic here as a widget. 
Now what if you want to have a specific text show up in a widget. Maybe it's an inspirational quote. Maybe some information you refer to all the time. You can set a widget to be any text you want by using Notes. So go to Notes and create a new note and then type whatever it is you want to appear. Then when you have that setup add the widget as a note but instead of a folder, a specific note. Select that. If it's not pointing to the right note right away you can Edit it by clicking here, selecting the note that you want. The great thing is you don't have to go to widgets to Edit this at all. You can just go and change the Note. Actually you can get right to the Note by just clicking here and it will open it up. 
Now what would be great is if you can do the same thing for Photos. You go to Photos here and have a widget that's a specific photo. But unfortunately you can't! None of these widgets have any settings. They'll just show special moments in Memories. So if you want to show a specific photo there, for now at least, you have to get a third party app. There are tons of widgets in the App Store that you can get. Most of them cost a little something, usually as an in-app purchase. Here's one that I'll install that allows you to put a photo and even a little bit of text for free. So usually the way these work is you have to run the app first and then you create the widget. So I'll just create a simple photo widget here. I'll edit it. I'll get rid of the default image here and instead add one of my own from the Photos App. You can crop it and rotate it and then you can see how it looks. I'll name it. You can see there are other types of widgets you can create. Add a clock or text on them. Now I can go into Widgets here. I go down to Edit widgets. I can go to that App and I can see the widget there. I can add it in. If I click I can then select the widget. Choose and I'll choose this one. Then you can see my Photo appears and now I've got this nice photo that I can move up here to the top so I can enjoy what it looks like. Let's go and change it to a medium size one so it stretches across. 
So one of the things I want to show here is that instead of using widgets for a variety of different things like this you really could just populate it with more of the same thing. For instance, you can put all your favorite photos here. So you could glance at them during the day. You could have a variety of weather for different locations or clocks or different notes showing bits of text that you need to review all day long. You don't have to a have a variety. You could just use widgets for just one thing and have the same widget over and over again with different properties to help you out with whatever information or task is involved. 
So finally I want to show you other ways to bring up Notification Center Widgets instead of just clicking here. You can, of course, use the keyboard shortcut. Go into System Preferences, Keyboard, and then Shortcuts. Select Mission Control and then there is a Show Notification Center shortcut. You have to check it to turn it On. Then you can set it to whatever you want. You also could go into Trackpad under More Gestures and there's one for Notification Center and you could use the default. Swipe left from the right edge with two fingers. So it's not actually swiping from the right side of the screen. It's the right side of the Trackpad. It doesn't matter where your pointer is located. The pointer is not going to move when you do this. It's just going to bring up Notification Center. Then you can do, kind of, the opposite thing and drag off to the right side in order for it to go away. Another way to bring it up is in Mission Control go to Hot Corners and you can set a Hot Corner for Notification Center. So, for instance, you can set it to the top right. Instead of having to click on the time if I just move my pointer to the top right it appears. 
So I hope these tips make Notification Center Widgets more useful to you. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 2 Responses to “Mac Notification Center Widgets Tips and Tricks”

Ken
3 years ago
As always, great information. I added a note widget to my notifications. I cannot seem to add a Note in which I had pinned it to the top of the Notes list. Is there anyway to add a pinned Note to the widget note?
Gary Rosenzweig
Ken: Try it again. I was able to add a pinned note like any other.
Comments Closed.
Mac Notification Center Widgets Tips and Tricks

Comments: 2 Responses to “Mac Notification Center Widgets Tips and Tricks”

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